RAVEN MACK is a mystic poet-philosopher-artist of the Greater Appalachian unorthodox tradition. He does have an amazing PATREON, but also *normal* ARTIST WEBSITE too.

Thursday, March 9

2017 Royal Poetry Rumble: The Tenth Installment

Well, we have arrived (slowly but honestly) at our
final four poets – Allison Hedge Coke, Jay Hopler, Lorna Crozier, and last
year’s winner Joy Harjo. To quickly repeat our protocol for learned poesy, as
these match-ups have been generated randomly by Excel spreadsheet randomization
formulas, the people are added back in. If there is any favoritism involved in
the match-ups (or lack of being drawn at all until late in the game), it is
Bill Gates fault (or the Google derivative to be more honest), not our’s. And
as I looked at these final four after the last set of 3 match-ups were
finished, I thunk to myself, “Oh man I hope I hope I HOPE that somehow Allison
Hedge Coke and Joy Harjo make the final.”

Last summer in the build-up to the MOST IMPORTANT
PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION EVER (until next one), I did an Amtrak/Greyhound loop
around the entire American country, from Virginia out to Seattle down to L.A.
back over to New Orleans then up home. I wrote tanka poetry (which likely will
never see the light of day) the entire time. On that trip I had two things
which really stuck out to me as take-aways – a) fuck fences or walls, they are
arbitrary in definition and apply ownership to everything, and b) you know
what? give control of the land back to the indigenous elders. I know that
sounds corny and cliché, and the automatic response anybody deeply immersed in
our form of empirical civilization would say, “You can’t just give all the land
away… that’d bring chaos!” And even in my own personal life, it’d be difficult
to literally give up ownership of the place I really don’t even have a single
cent of equity in to claim actual ownership of. But those were mytakeaways.

I have thought a lot in the past six months as
well about English as a colonial language, and whether it has taken the
necessary steps to be as natural a language as it could be, or whether it has
been used as an oppressing language. People around the world do not learn
English to write poetry – they learn it to conduct business, or get jobs. This
makes me sad, because this is the only language I am totally fluent in.

All this land we walk on (speaking to Americans
here but really the whole of the western hemisphere this is applicable to) did
not know the language currently used upon its surface until very recent times.
The language of the land has traditionally been something very different. I’m
not sure why this weighs so heavy on me the past half a year or so, but it
does, not like a “wow, that’s a sad fact, oh well, history, let’s go to the
movies,” but as a real fucking heavily saddening glaring fault that needs some
rectification of some sort.

Anyways, all this left me excited for two
indigenous women, both writing in what would not be their people’s native
language, but applying their innate philosophies to that language –
“reinventing the enemy’s language” as it is called in a collection of women
indigenous writers co-edited by Harjo I’m currently reading.

I don’t know how many people actually click these
things, or actually read these stories, but I suggest one of the most important
things one can do if they love poetry is to plant that language back into the
Earth, reconnect it with nature (even if writing about seemingly unnatural
humane subjects). There’s a lot of imbalance in our current situation as people
– politically, environmentally, poetically – and nature recalibrates shit if it
is allowed to.

I would’ve happily wrote all that for a proud
finale showdown between these two amazing writers, but our method did not
accommodate such manmade perfection. That is fine. One can’t go on long internet
diatribe about letting things happen more naturally, then complain because what
naturally happened didn’t meet their personal desires. Before this year’s Royal
Poetry Rumble, I had never read Allison Hedge Coke, so I am immensely thankful
this ridiculousness existed a second year for that alone.

Coke’s poem is of cancer, and mostly in Siouan
language it appears, so I am in the dark on half of it. I work in my day job in
a mundane administrative position related to cancer research, and though that
sounds noble (and certainly one can make a noble-sounding email signature for
themselves in such work), seeing the sausage made at the ol’ cancer research
factory scares the fuck out of me on many levels. I have lost loved ones to
cancer (haven’t we all at this point?), and likely will lose more
(statistically speaking, as well as knowing the medical history of family
members). Perhaps I am just stoned by the sunshine I sit under in my backyard
on this off day writing this shit at a tiny table, but perhaps the imbalance
spoken of earlier as applied to our words and our actions all contributes to
this cancer. I can’t say for certain in any scientific way, nor do I care to
(having seen the sausage factory on the inside). As for judging the poem,
there’s little for me to judge, but this:

The
spirit is connected

to the hair at the

crown—pahin hocoka.

The hair falls

the spirit goes,

the will is

connected no more.

This
feels more truthful than the science that rules my mundane desk job activities
forty hours a week.

Harjo’s poem begins by saying the crow calls “ah
ah” and then this “ah ah” is a universal language also spoken by ocean waves
and human lungs and the sounds of their oars and even the plane overhead (you
see? through language man reunited with nature, instead of “man vs. nature”)
and the sound of her soul being scraped also is “ah ah”, and as someone who
often sits in the woods attempting to better understand what the crows are
saying (no shit, I do this), I can say I support this poem heartily, in the most
literal sense of that word “heartily” possible.

THE KVLT SCHOLAR’S HANTEI: I don't think it is an
unreasonable position that I take when I insist that no cancer poems are good;
I have read a bunch of them, and they are just not good, and this is no exception.
Why do people do this. When I was the (bad) fiction editor of a (pretty good)
completely tiny literary magazine we would get so many stories about people
getting cancer and literally none of them were ever even ok. I think poems
about cancer are only like one discourse-level above people who say "fuck
cancer" when somebody dies of cancer, which is just the gooniest shit
ever. It is going to take a real fuckup on the part of "Ah Ah" not to
beat a poem that says "chemotherapy" and "leukemia" in
it and I say we find out together. Oh shit, it has crows. And also some
other things. I tell you this: "Ah ah scrapes the hull of my soul" is
some Melville-level seafaring compared to saying chemotherapy in a poem,
everybody please stop.

WINNER: "AH AH"

Eliminated at #4, but given (arbitrarily by me)
the 2017 Laura Kasischke Award for out-of-nowhere greatness, is Allison Hedge
Coke.

Lorna Crozier won last year’s Pat Crowther Award
for top Canadian woman poet. I figured I’d clarify that since I’ve been too
lazy to do so thus far, and she’s already eliminated three other poets, and is
now in the final four. I have not loved Crozier’s stuff, but I have not hated
it either. She very much reminds me of high school English teacher exposing the
young to poetry, which is to say I could not possibly dislike her, despite her
content being far off my base of knowledge. This Crozier poem is much like the
others in that I personally do not vibe to it, but I can see where someone who
is not me could enjoy it. I do not fault anyone for not being like me; in fact,
I’d encourage it.

Lololol, almost as if on cue, Hopler’s poem goes
through things I can relate to, and then drops:

As a man, I am a disappointment, I know that.

Is it my fault I was born in shadow?

The Hopler poem is depressing, but I feel it more
than Crozier’s, perhaps because I am generally depressed.

THE KVLT SCHOLAR’S HANTEI: "Once There Was A
Singing" uses familiar tales of myth and legend to talk about birds and
also trees that turn to ghosts and won't grow leaves which is to say it is a
poem written directly for me (thank you, mystery poet) so despite the really
quite lovely title of "And The Sunflower Weeps for the Sun, It's
Flower" this wasn't ever going to be close, was it, and also I
fundamentally disagree with the idea (in the latter) that emptiness is the only
freedom in a fallen world; I think that is an adolescent nihilism that
insufficiently accounts for love.

WINNER: "Once There Was a Singing"

Gone at #3 is Jay Hopler, and our Canadian kvlt
scholar (while blinded to author) pushes this last Canadian wild card poetess
through to the final, where Lorna Crozier will take on last year’s champion,
Joy Harjo. That will happen tomorrow on this ridiculous compendium of
illegitimate arts and scholarship called Rojonekku dotcom.

starting points

What It Do

Low art formed in low places by a real dude. Bread words on the bedazzling bedeviled internet machines. For flesh and blood contact, or exchanges of treasure or tribute): RAVEN MACK PO BOX 585 CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA 22902. For 1s and 0s robot contact (or exchanges of virus and vinegraic piss): ravenmack at gmail dot com. Paypal support can be thrown at that email address too if you got it like that.

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